HN user
I'm actually curious as to how many HN users find The New Yorker useful or insightful. It's always struck me as rather middlebrow and perhaps couched in the would-be-elitism of the east coast.
4chan usually does a better job than this.
Unless you have a statistical survey of the bitcoin community
I don't, and I don't think it's appropriate to make generalizations unless one has access to a sufficient body of empirical evidence. So I'm not making generalizations.
With that in mind, none of your opinions strike me as self-evident in an objective/empirical sense. Perhaps they're self-evident to you, but that doesn't make them the basis for sound argumentation.
It's unclear to me how I might have come across as defensive with respect to your comments; I merely don't find what you're saying to be convincing.
That's lovely for you, but not terribly relevant to anything I've stated.
An appeal to personal experience does not constitute a refutation of the assertion that a technology cannot possess sensibilities. Nor does it provide evidence that the majority of the present Bitcoin community shares such beliefs -- asserting otherwise constitutes a fallacy of improper generalization.
It's quite possible that the views most frequently articulated on Bitcoin Talk, etc. are those of a vocal minority.
The conflation of libertarianism with a variety of nonsensical positions is likely a deliberate attempt to discredit the ideology.
It's nonsense.
Some of the community is like that, sure. But it doesn't follow that the technology as a whole was created as a political vehicle, nor does it follow that it will necessarily serve as one.
A technology cannot possess sensibilities.
But there are plenty of people willing to assert otherwise.
Seeing various media outlets attempt to portray Bitcoin as some kind of Randian fetish with criminal undercurrents is getting rather tiresome.
"computer money invented to buy drugs." -- come on.
I get that the New Yorker is middlebrow yuppie polemic, but they could at least put a modicum of effort into an attempt at satire.
There's a key difference: Elon Musk is delivering results.
The scientific method enables one to deliver results because its models are predictive, not merely explanatory. The engineering and science we do today is also predictive because it relies on models cultivated within this methodology.
Equating today's "best guesses" with those in medieval or ancient times is absolutely inane.
Bitcoin is an interesting environment in which one might discuss the gender ratio.
On one hand, crypto-currency in general is a relatively new phenomenon -- it seems unlikely that there could be a well-established gender bias in the community, given its youth.
On the other hand, perhaps Bitcoin, etc. have inherited the apparent male-dominated attributes of the tech scene from which they emerged?
You. I like you.
I'm curious to see how spending the money would solve an extinction-level meteor strike. Or any number of other not-fully-predictable disasters.
I'd be curious to see a rational argument as to why this couldn't be the case.
You're looking too narrowly at the potential here.
What might begin as an underground colony full of social elites or skilled professionals required to run the infrastructure could result in a fully-habitable environment.
But if you don't plant the seeds and experiment with this, then it certainly won't get anywhere. Elon Musk is planting the seeds.
When he says "back-up the species" (not /save/, one would note), he's referring to planting the seeds for a long-term habitation which very well could be self-sufficient and continue progressing in the event of an extinction-level occurrence here on Earth.
And yet the US government was never able -- nor did they try -- to develop a fully-reusable rocket, which is something SpaceX is currently doing.
Saying that corporations are risk-averse followers is inane. Governments broadly fund a great deal of seed-level research. Sometimes they develop applications based upon it. Sometimes corporations get there first.
We're seeing an instance of the latter with SpaceX, I think.
It seems that the author is articulating the idea that developing for slower connections and using older technologies requires a different skill set than developing using the "state-of-the-art" in the Valley.
Isn't this self-evident? It's unclear why this should necessarily equate to greater respect for developers in the developing world, as a general assertion.
I'm not certain that assumption is necessarily correct.
Elon Musk seems more focused on affecting meaningful change and driving technology forward. He's using corporations as a vehicle to do that and making money is an incidental side-effect.
If profit was his primary motive, there would have been many other ways to invest his fortune from PayPal which entailed far lower risk and potentially significant gain.
Perhaps it's fair to say that they're at the absolute bleeding edge of /applied science/?
After all, SpaceX's plans for a reusable rocket are certainly more ambitious than anything governments have been doing for the last several decades.
The possibility of an extinction event on Earth isn't exactly far-flung speculation.
A major point of SpaceX is distributing humankind so that such a thing wouldn't wipe us all out.
It's particularly frightening to me because it appears that GitHub is attempting to do the right thing here -- investigate the allegations without the influence of potentially involved parties.
Yet, if such a thing is construed as an admission of guilt in the greater "court of public opinion" then there's an incentive to actively avoid any attempt at transparency.
Why should gender affect the acceptability of one's behavior?
No, they're only allowed to like top-40s and cosmos.
/s
Your post was in response to a post that contained the statement, "the richest and most powerful country in the world."
Foreign policy, affected by GDP, certainly plays a role in this.
It's only a myth if you're examining the situation from a singular angle -- that of monetary risk.
There's a great deal of risk and uncertainty involved in foregoing the completion of a degree, a potentially-salaried position at a stable firm, and so forth in favor of starting a company that is statistically unlikely to succeed.
Insofar as domestic policy is concerned, per-capita is relevant.
Foreign policy, which is decided by governments that tax the aggregate population (and thus draw from the GDP)? Not in the slightest.
None of those pre-modern great powers could compete either economically or militarily with the modern United States.
Of course, they might have been relatively more powerful in relation to their contemporaries, but that hardly implies anything relevant about the modern era.
This post contains a lot of loaded rhetoric.
Are you implying that the sort of people who assume the degree of risk required to build a financially-successful business (specifically of the "home-run" magnitude implied by a multi-billion-dollar acquisition, IPO, etc) are merely "self-aggrandizing money-chasers?"
Companies of that scale sometimes have the ability to improve society. There's also the potential for abuse.
But if a culture's general attitude toward aspiring to construct such a business entails disdain and mistrust, it hardly seems illogical to consider the possibility that cultural pressures are turning people away from the desire to do something entrepreneurial.
And that, I think, is the point that the author was attempting to make.
Teachers won't be replaced by software in environments where human discourse is necessary or valuable.
But research professors who either can't lecture or don't try to lecture well? It's almost inevitable. Lectures are a commodity that can be recorded and broadcast at a massive scale. Individual or small-group instruction isn't a commodity.
True, and it's a fair point. With that said, that isn't the case with my example -- none of my social circle has read the books.
An interesting point of view. With that said, my anecdotal experiences indicate that it's possible to discuss media with people even if you're not on the same page, as it were.
Consider Game of Thrones -- I'm perfectly able to discuss Seasons 1 and 2 with my friends who haven't yet seen Season 3, if I'm mindful to avoid spoilers.
Community discussion can be had, it just needs to be conscientious.
I'm fairly certain that the kind of Americans who frequent HN can perform trivial arithmetic.